Tarot and the Tree of Life

by Isabel Radow Kliegman

  Although these attitudes are apparently radically different, they have an important element in common. Nobody learns anything. No growth or insight occurs. No meaning is derived. Whether the reader is perceived as a performer, trickster, or priestess, all of the attention is on her. It is to her that all power is relinquished. The querent is a passive recipient of information or a scoffing baiter, but never a participant.

  Divination does not polarize querent and reader, but acknowledges that a valuable Tarot reading has three necessary components: a deck of cards, a competent and sensitive reader, and a right-minded querent. Every professional reader has had the experience of reading for someone whose cards fall into an instantly coherent constellation followed by a person whose spread is entirely opaque. Same deck. Same reader. Different querents. A person interested in divination approaches the Tarot with respect. There is a seriousness of purpose, an openness, and a wish to be seen, understood, known. There is a true desire for guidance, an integrity of self-perception, the honesty to face the difficult, the desire to learn and grow, the courage to change. The right attitude is that of active participation.

  The humanistic Tarot, as opposed to the esoteric Tarot, concerns “who we are, how we act, what forces shape and direct us,” according to Rachel Pollack. We use it to raise our level of awareness, shift our attention, and recognize our patterns of response—and our responsibility in those patterns. Because we, each of us, can look at the Tarot images, respond to them, and project on them, this interaction is possible. Unlike astrology, for example, we don’t need to turn ourselves over to “the expert.” We can dialogue with the reader of Tarot in terms of what we perceive in the cards, how we react to them.

  But don’t the cards foretell the future? If I ask about my job security, and the Ten of Swords—a prone figure pierced by ten swords—is the final outcome of my spread, doesn’t that reveal my fate? Isn’t my fate sealed? In a prognostication, such a card of death is the herald of doom. The querent has given away all power; the reader has made a pronouncement; the game is done. In divination, however, the entire purpose of the reading is to empower the querent. The reader, like the cards themselves, is an instrument of insight and growth. The querent can change the reading.

  How do you change a reading you don’t like? That sounds too good to be true! Well, the good news is that you can change a reading, and the bad news is that you can’t change the cards. Let me explain. One balmy evening, I was driving down the hill from my home at roughly twenty miles per hour above the speed limit. It is a rugged area with no cross streets and one that invites disregard of rules. On this occasion, however, several cars driving up the hill flashed their lights at me. It was still light out, so I checked to make sure my lights weren’t on. I checked my turn signal. Then, from the dark recesses of my mind, a memory flickered. Flashing lights by passing motorists warn of a policeman in the area. I slowed my car, passed the policeman at the legal speed limit, and avoided a citation. That’s how you change a reading.

  A Tarot reading shows you where you are headed if you continue your present course of action. A Tarot reading is the flashing light of warning. The choice is then yours. I could have chosen to continue driving too fast, but the consequences had been made clear. If you want to be assured of job security, you don’t lay the cards again and hope for a better outcome card. You change your behavior: get to work earlier, stay later, find ways of avoiding conflict, become more productive and valuable on the job. The reading tells you only what the outcome will be if you don’t—if you choose to go on as if you hadn’t consulted the cards at all.

  Finally, let me address some of the most frequently asked questions about the Tarot cards themselves. The first involves their handling and what we do with them. Is it true that someone must give you your first deck? Is it true that you should never allow anyone else to handle your cards? Should you wrap them in silk? Is a sandalwood box better? Or a gold one? How can we use them? I like to suggest baking with the cards, using the Minor Arcana as a sugar substitute, one card per tablespoon of sugar. Or shred them like confetti and add them to a bubble bath. Am I making my point? Put the cards to whatever use works for you. If your understanding is magnified by sleeping with a card under your pillow, who am I to call it nonsense? If your deck feels more vital for having been lovingly wrapped in Japanese silk or sheltered in Arabian sandalwood, why not store it in that way? The cards are little cardboard pictures, to be protected or destroyed by you. They are only little cardboard pictures. They have no power other than the power you invest in them. They are the instrument. The power is in you. The power is in each of us, in the glorious human psyche, with its infinite capacity to search and sense and stretch and unfold.

  Having said this, we are now ready to turn our attention to the Tree of Life, an instrument of great power that will prove invaluable to our understanding of the cards.

  Each vessel, or sefirah, on the Tree is named for an attribute of the infinite, unknowable God. Each bears an archetype of that manifestation of the divine. The Minor Arcana may be seen as pictorial expressions of those archetypes. Underlying the historical association of vessel and card is a potent, mysterious psychological truth: The Kabbalistic Tree of Life provides the archetypes by which the Tarot can be understood. This observation is well made by Stephan Hoeller, drawing on the teachings of Carl Jung, in The Royal Road: “The coincidence of the two systems…is not a mere haphazard concurrence of unrelated circumstances, but is a meaningful coincidence of great psychological, or if you prefer, mystical power and purpose.”

  As Gershom Scholem conceded privately to Stephan Hoeller, and as the latter emphasizes in The Royal Road, “the combined system of Kabbalah and Tarot works.…Past history matters less than firsthand experience.” If the proof of the pudding is, indeed, in the eating, then sample the wares herein and be your own best judge.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Kabbalah: The Ultimate Gift

  KABBALAH is a sophisticated and mystical system of thought that deserves a lifetime of dedicated focus, study, meditation, and prayer. So, in a sense, to talk about Kabbalah briefly, as I do here, is to do it a disservice. To experience Kabbalah is quite different.

  It is impossible to talk definitively about mystical experience, which is of course what Kabbalah is. It is like trying to describe chocolate to one who has never tasted it or the color red to someone who has never seen color. Having said that, we do want to say what we can about Kabbalah, because, for our purposes, it seems to be better than saying nothing. But we must always remember that we are not dealing with the immediate experience of Kabbalah, which is a nonlinear, noncognitive experience—a mystical experience.

  Originally, there were three requirements for the study of Kabbalah. Number one, you had to be a man. I will refrain from commenting on that particular stipulation. Number two, you had to be at least forty years of age. And number three, you had to be married. Can we clear our rage at the sexism this involves and at the bias that only married people are capable of studying Kabbalah appropriately? How are we to react to the restriction on age? “I’m thirty-nine years, eleven months, and two weeks old; can’t make it. In two weeks, when I am forty, all of life will open up to me with clarity. Can’t wait!”

  If we can put aside our offense at what seems to be both insulting and silly, however, we can question what might have been at the heart of those restrictions. The answer becomes clear when we remember the midrash, the interpretive story, about four rabbis who entered paradise. One of them dropped dead on the spot. Another became apostate, losing his faith in one God. A third went stark raving mad, and the fourth departed paradise in peace. That was Rabbi Akiba. He left in peace because he entered in peace. He entered paradise centered, serene, and balanced within himself, so that is the way he left.

  Similarly, what we’re actually confronting in these apparently foolish restrictions is the need for groundedness and preparation. First, if we are going to enter the mystical realm of Kabbalah, which
draws so heavily on the female side of us—the intuitive, the psychic, the mysterious—we have to approach it with a highly developed male part of ourselves. To use Jungian terms, if we are going into anima activity we need a strongly developed animus. If we do not have this, whether we are male or female, we are going to be yanked way off balance. We can understand the necessity of being a “man” in these terms. Each of us, male or female in body, is androgynous. To study Kabbalah, we require a strongly developed male side, so that logic, reason, objectivity, and the capacity for analytical thinking will balance the experiences we may encounter in this pursuit. Secondly, to be “married” may be understood to mean engaged in life on Earth. We must have the kind of commitment that will keep us present and actively, enthusiastically relating in our lives. Marriage is, I believe, a metaphor. Finally, to say that we have to be forty years old is to say only that we need to have had some experience of life. We have to be grounded. We need to have made necessary preparation.

  Many are the horror stories of inadequately prepared people who play around with powerful forces. In Hindu and Buddhist tradition, the life force coiled at the base of the spine is called kundalini. The benefits of raising kundalini energy are legion. I know of one man who was extremely successful in getting his kundalini to rise, but he did not then know what to do with that energy. He had an idea of how to go about the process, and he was successful at it as a craft, but he was not grounded in any belief system and had no understanding of what he was doing. He is now paralyzed from the waist down.

  More common are the people who take drug trips. They are catapulted into realms of tremendous excitement, exploration, and discovery. Yet very often these experiences pull people off the deep end. They find themselves unable to function anymore. The difference between the acidhead and the prophet is preparation. The former have experiences that are transitory and ultimately of no use to anyone, including themselves. Of the many societies in which mind-altering drugs have played a role, ours alone is plagued with problems of addiction and deviant behavior. Mystical experience, regardless of its source, must, if it is to have meaning, occur in appropriate context. Maturity, balance, and the wish to use these experiences to enhance rather than to escape from life are wise criteria to apply here. These are, I believe, how the traditional requirements for the study of Kabbalah are to be understood.

  Having made this apology, let me begin by saying that the most important thing to know about Kabbalah is very simple: Kabbalah means “receiving.” That tells us a number of things. First, that God the Creator chooses for us to receive. We are dealing with an explanation of the creation in terms of a generous God. The concept here is that God, being perfect and complete, has as His essence the desire to impart; He creates the entire universe so that there will be something to receive what is given. (Kabbalistically, the godhead is twofold. There is Adonai, the male aspect of the godhead, the Lord. And there is the Holy Shechinah, the female aspect of the godhead. We are dealing with an androgynous spirit. For the sake of grace as well as brevity I sometimes use words like He, His, and Lord. That is not to be understood as male but as the divine ruling spirit, the Eternal One. Similarly, to avoid both the sexist he and the awkward he or she, I have opted for the ungrammatical they, pending the evolution of a genderless singular pronoun.)

  God then, however we conceive that spirit energy, has as His essence the desire to impart, since He needs nothing. He therefore creates a universe that is meant to receive. The animals can receive, but not with conscious awareness. The angels don’t need to receive in the same way that we do, although they have conscious awareness. Human beings alone were created to receive with conscious awareness what it is that God the Creator has to offer. Therefore, we are the only ones who can sanctify, who can bless the creation.

  The implications of this are rather staggering. One is that human beings are the crown of creation! We are the point of it all. There would be no creation if it weren’t for human beings. Basic to the Kabbalistic system, then, is that the universe is created by a loving God whose wish is to give and who has created us specifically as creatures who can receive, with loving awareness and conscious appreciation.

  This is very different from certain Christian beliefs in which we are born in a state of sin. We are all responsible for and guilty of the so-called original sin and come into the world apologizing, trying to make it up to God. There are systems of Christian belief in which we cannot be saved by good works, but only by grace, God’s gift to us, because we are, in our essence, sinful and therefore incapable of earning our own salvation. This is totally different from the Kabbalistic view. In Kabbalah, human beings are born to receive; we are the fulfillment of all creation and exactly as we should be. We have choices to make, and we can fall into evil ways, but we are born perfect.

  That Kabbalah means “receiving” involves another important implication: receiving is not associated with selfishness. We are here to receive, we have been created to receive. If we come into this world screaming and wailing and crying, “Make me comfortable! Make me warm! Feed me! Take care of me!”, it is exactly what we’re supposed to do! God is rubbing His hands in delight, thinking, “I’ve done it again! Another perfect person!” And if we go through our lives screaming, “Give me! Give me! Give me!” this does not make us selfish or evil. This is what we are designed for.

  Does that mean there’s no such thing as selfishness in Kabbalistic thought? Does that mean there is no such thing as evil? Not at all. What it does mean is that the distinction between good and evil, or the unselfish and the selfish, occurs after the desire to receive. The impulse to good, or Yetzer Ha-tov, is the desire to receive in order to impart, to share, to bring forth into the world. The evil impulse, or Yetzer Ha-rah, is the desire to receive for oneself alone. To receive and retain, to hold back, is selfish. The desire to receive in itself, however, is blessed.

  Another important concept in Kabbalah involves the relatedness between ourselves and the universe. This must be understood in terms of how God created the universe. We come again to a marked departure from many other systems of belief.

  God created the universe by emanation. God allowed His own essence to flow forth, to radiate forth, and in so doing filled the world with His own being. What does that mean? What are the implications? First, if everything that exists partakes of God energy, then each of us has not something godlike within, but has God within! God is within each of us. It can indeed be said that each of us is God, that we are God.

  And what does that mean about our relationship to one another? It is not that we are all sisters and brothers; that doesn’t tell the half of it. We are clones! We are spiritual clones of one another. We couldn’t be more closely related to one another. If what is in me is what is in you, we are indeed one.

  We now have a new understanding of the central prayer of Judaism, the Shema. The Shema says, “Shema Yisrael Adonai, Elohenu, Adonai Echod.” That means, “Hear, oh Israel, the Lord is God, the Lord is One.” What does that truly mean?

  Let’s begin with “Hear, oh Israel.” How did the universe come into being? Many physicists now say it was with the Big Bang. The sound of that bang, we are told by scientists as well as spiritual leaders, reverberates throughout the entire universe and will continue forever. There’s no limitation to the universe. There’s nothing to stop those sound waves. So we are being asked to hear, to tune into that moment of creation in which all was clearly one. “Hear, oh Israel.” Who are the people of Israel? Does this refer just to people born of Jewish parents?

  The word Israel first appears in the Old Testament when Jacob wrestles with an angel. All day and all night he struggles, and he says to the angel, “I will not let thee go until thou bless me.” At dawn he wrests his blessing from the angel, and at that moment he is called Israel because Israel means “one who struggles with God.” The one who struggles with divine energy. Everyone reading this book is an Israelite. Everyone who sees these words is a part of the people of Is
rael.

  Adonai, Elohenu, Adonai Echod. Adonai means “the Lord.” Adonai is the Creator God. Elohenu means “the God within,” the God that I experience in my everyday life, the God I experience as my share of the emanation. Echod means “is one.” What’s up there and what’s within is one God. The remote godhead and my own soul, all our souls, are one.

  The metaphor that is often used to explain this is light. This is appropriate for a number of reasons. First, we all have a great love of light. Plants gravitate toward the light and need light for photosynthesis. If we drive by the ocean at sunset, we see all of the seagulls lined up facing the sun, getting the last rays of sunlight. Second, light is unique in that, in shining forth, it is undiminished. Unlike water, for example, the source is unaltered by the pouring forth. And most importantly, light is a principle of union. If I light a candle and then with that candle I light another candle, I have two candles and I have two sources of light, but I have one light. Light is light. It’s the same light. So to speak of God’s nature as light which emanates forth is to remind us that while there may be many different candles, the light within each of us is the same.

  This notion of oneness, of a total and complete unity, is the basis of Judaism and the basis of Kabbalah. It is easy to say, one would think it would be the easiest thing in the world to grasp, and yet living as if we are all one is the greatest challenge we can undertake. Living as if we are one with even immediate family seems impossible most of the time: the promiscuous daughter, the alcoholic mother, the irresponsible father, the stingy son, the sister on drugs, the smug grandmother, the self-righteous grandfather, the manipulative brother, the uncle whose rage terrifies everyone. How are we then to live our belief in oneness with strangers, or worse, those crazy, peculiar, dangerous foreigners who can’t even speak English? Further, it is not enough, Kabbalistically, to live as if we are one with the majestic lion. We must also strive to feel at one with serpents and scorpions! At one with not just the family dogs but with their ticks and fleas. That’s the challenge. That’s a message that takes a lifetime of understanding and practice.